The pointlessness of East / West in art and culture
A while ago I was part of a post-show Q&A panel with audiences, for a musical performance based on early 20th century Chinese history, the performance piece took place in London, a question came up a few times: about how do we go about balancing “East” and “West” elements with a show with said context? In a show about Chinese history in English?
Fundamentally two major problems with this question which is built upon several assumptions:
- Reducing and grouping varieties of Asiatic Culture and Eurocentric culture in a reductionistic binary groups
- Ignoring the complex historical influences between culture and people
There is a catch, though, because these two points are actually somewhat conflicting. The Eastern vs. Western incentives are not without historical bases, and by using this way of addressing culture, most people actually understand what you mean by East and West. Here I would love to dive deeper into each point and provide some more context for each and explain why while it’s actually an easy-to-understand way to address culture, they are largely inadequate when it comes to talking about the nuances and process of culture works, like in my professional works as an ethically “Eastern” artist working in a “Western” society, feels like an extremely low resolution way of looking at things.
Where even is “East”?
The term Eastern countries was first popularised by the Brits, who at the time of conquering the world as the world’s most successful drug dealers and human traffickers, con the term East to address regions of the world approximately to London — Near East as Mediterranean and what we would call Eastern European, Middle East as a large chunk of the world from North Africa to India, and Far East for anything beyond like China, Japan and Korea and more.
These terms are somewhat helpful in historical context as understanding of culture are difficult to process in the past, and these are a somewhat usefully line for Eurocentric colonists to draw knowing what to expect when you get to certain parts of the world, as the culture of these regions drawn are somewhat tied to the cultural and economic centres of those regions — many of the “Far East” countries have frequent trades, influenced and subject to one Chinese dynasty or the other. There is a common thread in aesthetics, architecture, cuisines, and much, much more due to the close relations between these countries, and it would make sense for the colonising European at the time to group these countries together as a large cultural group.
Due to this historical development, there is no “North” and “South” cultural style when the terms East and West are conned, the rich and diverse cultures of the Southern Hemisphere were ignored by Europeans scholars, especially with the rise of Darwinism ideologies that were used by racist academics to see these culture context as subhumans, not being considered as part of human culture and history.
Cross influence of culture
Things get much more complicated when we consider the early period of globalisation has changed how culture developed. As we examine history closer to our time, we’ll realise the term “East” and “West” fail to address many of the nuances and interaction of cultural development in human history.
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, as colonisers needed ways to differentiate cultural styles and influences, simple terms are fairly useful tools as there are large separations between the two. In traditional Chinese arts, some of the most notable art forms such as shan shui paintings (Chinese ink paintings, usually depict natural landscape and animals), and abstract poems that express state of mind through description of environments. These ways of artistic presentation are much similar to more modern and contemporary Eurocentric artistic expression as opposed to the heavy focus on colour theory, depths of views, composition and realism of the European arts at that time.
This two stream of art styles development, however, gets muddy when globalisation comes into place during the height of colonisation. One of the most prolific “Western” artists, Vincent van Gogh, is largely influenced by “Eastern” art forms and expressions. Van Gogh has a large collection of Japanese paintings, thanks to the trade between Japan and Dutch at his time; he on many occasions, as evidence by the letters between him and his brother Theo Van Gogh where he will not stop gushing over how special Japanese arts are, and elements of Japanese art — flatten depth that highlights the subjects, simple colour palette that is rarely used in European Colours theories — can be seen in many of his works, if not, dare I say, the main characteristics of his works.
“All my work is based to some extent on Japanese art…”
— Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo from Arles, 15 July 1888
The same influences can also be seen in modern “Eastern” artists, where post-colonial period poets and painters take on a much more European approach to writing and drawing — examples like the first “Eastern” Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore in 1913 had to adopt writing style that accommodate European academics make it seems like the Eurocentric arts are more preferable and thus change the of trajectory of literature art in India and beyond. Using the binary definition of East and West not only ignores the development of history in the past few hundred years but enables the colonising narrative to continue to limit and impose these preferences into contemporary culture.
What’s the alternatives?
All that being said, I do want to clarify two things when it comes to using “East” and “West” to describe art style and cultural background. 1: I understand completely what you mean when you used these two terms, and in normal conversation I wouldn’t go out of my way to tell you why you shouldn’t use them; that being said — 2: as languages evolve, there are bound to be words that will fall out of its original intended use, an excellent an example would be the word “gender”, originally used as its close linguistic cousins of “genres” and “genus” and now have a completely different connotation in our social landscape.
“East” and “West” is one of those words that had meaningful usage at the time it was invented, but simply too clunky and inadequate to use to describe something as specific and important as culture influences and art. Eastern/Western as definition is simply not going to evolve into anything useful as different cultures continue to merge and develop in our contemporary world. The alternative is quite simple — if you’re going to talk about a specific aspect of cultural ideas and contexts, be specific and precise goes a long way, and being aware of the complexity of these issue help pushes language and communication in art and culture in a positive and useful direction.
